The Soteriological Character of Post-Axial Religion

Abstract

The phenomenology of religion is a vast jungle of proliferating diversity in which discordant facts have continually attacked and destroyed large-scale theories and in which few generalisations have been able to survive. Nevertheless, two broad interpretive concepts have emerged to very widespread acceptance, and both are important for the argument of this book.

The existence of an axial time, which is placed in the first millenium B.c.: it was then that our intellectual, moral and religious civilization was born and that the foundations were laid on which we continue to build, despite differences in the superstructures we have erected and go on erecting.

(Weil 1975, 21)